While she wears her heart on her sleeve, it seems she is in a minority in modern fiction.

New British books show significantly less emotion than they did a century ago, academics say.

Hankies at the ready! British books published before the 1960s were far more emotional than their American counterparts

Academics analysed how frequently ‘mood’ words - those reflecting anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise - were used in more than five million books published between 1900 to 2000.

According to lead researcher Dr Alberto Acerbi from the University of Bristol, the average book published at the start of the 20th century has 14 per cent more emotional content than a novel from the end.

Share this article

‘Our main point was to show that we can detect this trend - that use of emotional content changes over time,’ said Dr Acerbi, a Newton Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

‘The average 1900 book is 1.14 times more emotional than the average book in 2000. This means that if a book had 1000 emotional words in 1900, now it will have 877 emotional words.’

Modern day books have far less passion in them, and researchers say people fear ridicule for showing emotion

Speaking about the research author Jilly Cooper said: ‘People are unsure how to express emotions now. They think it is a bit wet going over the top, and maybe people fear ridicule. There is certainly less conviction and passion in modern books.

‘My books are very full of joy, they are like a knickerbocker glory of love.’

The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found that as well as general decrease in emotions, the use of positive or negative mood words seemed to reflect historical events.

There were two happy peaks where greater ‘joy’ words were used in books - those published after the First World War and in the 1960s. In contrast, researchers found a sad peak corresponding to the Second World War.

‘We were initially surprised to see how well periods of positive and negative moods correlated with historical events,’ said Dr Acerbi. ‘The Second World War, for example, is marked by a distinct increase in words related to sadness, and a correspondent decrease in words related to joy.’

Until the middle of the last century, British writers used slightly more emotional language than their American counterparts.

But the study found that since the 1960s there has been a divergence in style, with American books becoming decidedly more emotional, a possible reflection of the differing fortunes of the ‘baby boomer’ generation on each side of the Atlantic.

The same divergence was also found in the use of content-free words, which are words that carry little or no meaning on their own like conjunctions such as ‘and’ or ‘but’, and articles such as ‘the’.

‘This is particularly fascinating because it has recently been shown that differences in usage of content-free words are a signature of different stylistic periods in the history of western literature,’ said Dr Acerbi.

The divergence in emotional content between the two forms of English suggests a more general stylistic divide.

Co-author Professor Alex Bentley said: ‘We don’t know exactly what happened in the Sixties but our results show that this is the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge. We can only speculate whether this was connected, for example, to the baby-boom or to the rising of counterculture.

‘In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period so perhaps ‘emotionalism’ was a luxury of economic growth.’

The study also recorded an increased occurrence of anxiety and paranoia in our literature, with the average book in 2000 possession 12 per cent more words indicating fear than a 1960 publication.